Brewing Sunday Part 1

Well, its the long weekend and as mentioned in my last post one day this weekend was going to be brew day, the only change was that instead of a stout I decided to do a British Style Bitter !! I started by relistening to the Jamil Show on the style , unfortunately the recipe discussed mentions a whole lot of ingredients that we in South Africa don't have easy access to, so I created my own recipe loosely based on a recipe in Grham Wheelers CAMRA book on homebrewing. The recipe which is for 42.5 litres (which gives me a collected volume of 38 litres or two 19 litre (5 US Gallon) corny kegs is as follows :-

6kg Pale Malt
0.33 kg Crystal malt
0.215 kg light Brown Sugar
35 grams Southern Brewer Hop Pellets (approx 9% Alpha Acid) boiled for 90 minutes.
32 grams Fuggles whole hops (approximately 4.5% Alpha Acid) boiled for 15 minutes.
Single infusion mash at 67deg C for 90 minutes.
1 teaspoon irish moss for 15 minutes.
1 sachet 11.5 grams Fermentis Safale S04 ale yeast made up into 2 litre starter.

I created the recipe using my own spreadsheet and then entered the same recipe into beer tools and Qbrew. My idea was to see which came closest to the actual gravity achieved. So armed with my recipe brewday was about to begin !